This paper includes a survey of some of the sources and transformations of utopian ideas, together with a discussion of current salvationism. These ideas usually have been associated with religious inspiration. More recently science has been used as a basis for redemptionist hopes, replacing religious revelation. People find more hope in science than religion and their hopes are more for salvation in the present than in the hereafter. There is a tendency to lodge basic utopian hopes in psychoanalysis. The views and teachings of Gnostic psychoanalysts, for instance, Erich Fromm, and theoreticians such as Herbert